‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#171

Post by HillaryBriss » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #68

From an earlier thread: I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies. The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply. You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect tes…

i wanted to upvote your comment until i noticed that you spelled your handle "IvyAdmisions" instead of "IvyAdmissions."

you're clearly a very talented individual with relevant experience, but i feel your ideas are best expressed on one of the lesser comment boards, perhaps a Yahoo forum or some place on Google+.

thank you for your interest in posting a comment here. best wishes for your future.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#172

Post by majos » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

sadamznintern wrote: post #54

speedplane wrote: post #23

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental…

It’s because the people pushing the lawsuit don’t care about the issues, rather they just want to divide 2 minority groups and pit them against one another.

I don't think so, rather I think everyone involved tacitly accepts that a ton of money and power is sufficient to buy your way into pretty much anything, even (especially?) top universities that enjoy cultivating money and power. There's a clear quid pro quo though.

It's less clear what the quid pro quo is for racial discrimination against Asians, so people are less okay with it.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#173

Post by WillPostForFood » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #68

From an earlier thread: I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies. The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply. You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect tes…

May I ask, what was the racial breakdown of the admissions officers? Were there any asians?

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#174

Post by gammateam » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #23

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental…

> We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit.

Or were sold a merit based social contract and it has always been an ineffective set of rules that has no bearing on the way goods and resources are apportioned.

Your cognitive dissonance comes from how you expect goods and resources to be apportioned. How you expect people should "earn" access, when the elites/oligarchs/connected rarely earn anything. They merely maintain access.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#175

Post by Anechoic » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:58 PM UTC

verylongname wrote: post #45

lozenge wrote: post #44

'Yet another was “bright & busy” but it was “a bit difficult to see what would hold him in during a lop.”' 'admissions officers then fine-tune the final class using a form that lists five pieces of information about the applicant; they give an example of a form that has spaces for the applicant’s name, LIN (lineage), ETH (ethnicity), ATH (athlete), and HFAI (financial aid).' It's undeniably racism. I wonder what the…

See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions. As far as I can tell, it hasn't put any pressure on the Ivy's to change. Incidentally, Caltech's latest class is roughly 50% Asian and about 30% white.

See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions

This is not true. See http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds (pick any year), Section C7.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#176

Post by majos » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #84

This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to invariably use political methods in order to produce a desired outcome. These processes were completely political until the ancient Greeks, who experimented with things like randomness to grant power to lower-class citizens. Some of my favorite videos on YouTube d…

Interestingly enough, randomness may be poised to make a comeback in decision-making as more decisions get made by algorithms. Many proposed "fair" learning algorithms require randomness, and IIRC the American legal attitude to fairness-through-randomness is not well-specified.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#177

Post by drb91 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:08 PM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #27

strstr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Z-list probably isn't illegal (despite it being pretty disheartening).

Of course it isn't illegal. Folks with money and power create the rules, and obviously one of the first rules you'd make is that those with money and power can use that money and power to get what they want. But just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right or it should be. And you could potentially make a case that it's illegal, even though it's flimsy and you'd probably would lose. Harvard makes all sorts of clai…

> I could see a Harvard grad suing the school for admitting Z-List students because it waters down the prestige of their degree.

In my experience the social access of the Z-list is the primary draw of an “ivy-league” education.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#178

Post by vinceguidry » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:11 PM UTC

majos wrote: post #176

vinceguidry wrote: post #84

This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to invariably use political methods in order to produce a desired outcome. These processes were completely political until the ancient Greeks, who experimented with things like randomness to grant power to lower-class citizens. Some of my favorite videos on YouTube d…

Interestingly enough, randomness may be poised to make a comeback in decision-making as more decisions get made by algorithms. Many proposed "fair" learning algorithms require randomness, and IIRC the American legal attitude to fairness-through-randomness is not well-specified.

My intuitive grasp of the issue is that the game eventually resolves down to virtual randomness as candidacy features become indistinguishable.

The military phrase at hand is 'damning with faint praise'. One word in one performance report can put you out to pasture. Literally everybody knows this so anything even the slightest bit off glares at you like a giant grinning rictus on a 40 foot movie screen. "who did he piss off to get 'excellent' instead of 'superlative'?"

In an environment where literally everyone involved is so sensitive to noticeable features, transparency becomes opaqueness and all decisions are based on the whims of the oligarchy. When all the whims are satisfied, that's where the process becomes indistinguishable from random. There's no criteria left with which to make a decision, let's just pay lip service to merit while just picking names out of a hat to keep them all honest.

Everywhere else where this dynamic manifests, selection processes are not even half as public as those of the top educational facilities in the world's most powerful country.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if, after demographic shaping wishes are satisfied, Harvard's selection criteria for the remaining candidates can't be meaningfully distinguished from random.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#179

Post by Aunche » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #23

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental…

If you're buying your way into Harvard, you aren't taking a spot from someone else. You're essentially paying for a new spot to be created.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#180

Post by johngalt » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #84

This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to invariably use political methods in order to produce a desired outcome. These processes were completely political until the ancient Greeks, who experimented with things like randomness to grant power to lower-class citizens. Some of my favorite videos on YouTube d…

You are talking about a fairly elite team here. Tossing in a few average/random people via sortition would only be a humiliating waste of time. Could you imagine a few random people in an NFL game?